by Jeremy Page
They let me sit in the prow with a plastic rifle across my lap. My parents stood by the front porch - the sight of the boat meaning so much to them, they put their arms round each other for support one last time, gazing at me sitting among the cobwebs, fixing them in the gun’s sights. And as the fenland twilight did arrive, we smelled the pie - even there in the yard - and we all went inside to eat.
He ate the pie too fast, looked at his watch too many times, urged us along to clear our plates - Don’t hurry him George, he’s doing his best - Can’t keep ’em waiting. Ain’t right. Pip, you going to eat them mushrooms? I crammed the last of the pastry into my mouth and then we were walking out, all three of us, past the rotting boat to his car.
Am I all right like this? my mother asks. She’s in a check skirt and a mustard-coloured sweater, which is stopping her bending her neck. Course, he replies. Look lovely. But there’s a tone of doubt under his assurance and she picks up on it, decides to say nothing, begins to worry. George . . . Don’t start, Lil’, I know you don’t want to go but you got to get out. Time you met ’em proper. They’re a nice crowd, Lil’.
Ten minutes later we were at the Stow Bardolph Estate, looking at a gleaming orange fondue pot in the centre of the table. Both my parents were stuffed from the pigeon pie as my father had said there’d be nothing to eat at the party, but they didn’t want to let anyone down, so they obediently took their places and marvelled at the odd cauldron and the little blue flame and the huge pile of food for their skewers. It was a room off the kitchens. Candlelit and Spartan, and my mother knew everyone was wondering how she’d bear up to the evening.
My father wore a bright orange shirt. He’d waxed his hair back to show off his new sideburns and his face had a scrubbed raw look like he’d just woken up. My mother’s face was still flushed from the cooking, then flushed with the first lot of eating, and she drank two glasses of cider so quickly she had to burp several times behind her hand. Then she kept losing her pieces of bread in the cheese-and-wine mix, and my father kept mocking her for not pushing her bread on to the skewer firmly enough. The others at the table laughed too loudly at my father’s criticisms of his wife; he didn’t know whether to play up to it or not, and his scrubbed face began to take on a waxy, pained look. She’s full, I thought. She’s going to be sick, and I watched the little red spot on my father’s skewer and hoped the piece of bread or vegetable on the end of it would fall off and drown somewhere in the mix. And if only my mother would stop her nervous giggling, if only she’d lift her skewer and all the pieces of bread would be miraculously impaled on it, like the fisherman on the boat who manages to land the whole catch. Remember how you caught the weever, I thought. But it didn’t happen. She kept losing her food, and he became more irritated, feeling that somehow he was being shown up by her.
Hair go, George, you got it. No you han’t - thass mine. Yeah, you reckon? Lil’ - Lil’ - put some carrot on that an’ give it a go.
Eight people round a wooden table, lit by candlelight and the thin glow of meths. Martha, the cook - her face redder than my mother’s - at the end of the table because her laugh was too loud. Never lose that one in fog, they used to say. Two farmhands - rindy, strong men with little to say, simple minds and wiry hearts - and three girls, all of whom worked for the house.
Curiously, my father’s red-tipped skewer began to play with a pink-tipped skewer, which was held by a female hand that didn’t belong to my mother, and at the same time the foot of the woman who was not my mother slid out of her shoe and tickled my father’s leg. A stockinged foot wriggling like an eel against the thick trunk of his leg.
The meal seemed to be over, and the red-tipped skewer and the pink-tipped skewer leaned next to each other. More wine was being poured, there was talk of raiding the cellar, and my mother was listening to a convoluted tale about someone who was not at the party and how he’d had to take four armchairs to London in a car and when that broke down he’d taken them by train. Sat in them on a King’s Cross platform. One of the farmhands was telling the story in a mealy voice, egged along because someone was listening, but not that interested in telling the story again. My mother had just learned to put her hand over the glass to stop it being refilled, but her face looked slack and thin and I knew she was struggling.
I was confused about who’d touched my father’s leg, so I began to knock my fork against the side of my chair until my mother broke away from the story to hush me. My father turned to me with a warning expression. I returned his gaze angrily, then continued to stare at the fondue pot while banging my fork on the chair. Eventually I heard a woman’s voice say perhaps he’d like to try the fondue. My father’s face lit up with the suggestion, and a woman’s hand reached in and very consciously chose the pink-tipped skewer and fished out a piece of soggy bread and cheese. I stared at the skewer, at the hand, the arm and finally at the face of the woman who wasn’t my mother. Saw her young, small face and her hair swept back behind her head, saw her bouncing enthusiastically round the table with the skewer in her hand. This girl, this girl leaned down in a cloud of her own scent in front of me, her hair falling forward as she did so. I stared at her red lipstick, which outlined the shape of lips on her mouth which weren’t exactly her own, at the small pebble of her chin and the creamy sheen of candlelight on her neck. I refused to open my mouth, and watched her growing discomfort as she tried and failed to perform a mother’s job.
As we drove back over the estate’s pasture, neither of my parents spoke. My family felt threadbare with silence and the toll of the evening. The car bumped along over the fields, the pale eyes of cattle reflecting brilliantly at us in the headlights, the scent of grass and dung and dry earth blowing in through the open windows and the acid lemon smell of an air freshener he’d recently stuck to the dashboard. My father was drunk, and as we approached the hedge he couldn’t find the gate. He shone the headlights on the hedge and got out to have a closer look and to take a leak, and when he got back in he said I’m going to sort the sheds. We’ll have to get rid of the boat.
But before he was up next morning she was out there, dragging the Mary Magdalene round to the chicken coop. Hair stuck to her face, boots skidding in the mud, and me beside her, more hindrance than help, tugging at the rope as though the weight on the other end was round my father’s throat.
That boat, dusty, warped, as dry as a church Bible, it was ours. She stripped away the old paint, filled the wood, caulked the seams, rubbed it down, skills she’d learned repairing the decoys my father shot to pieces. Polished the brass, cut in some wood along the rail. I walked up and down the boat in which I was conceived, rubbing grease into the wood, wiping marks off the hull, grinning at my mother as she became dirtier as the boat grew cleaner. Eventually she painted it a pure light blue, growing darker along the keel. And when the paint was dry she began to sketch on clouds: cirrus like gossamer threads, cumulonimbus, strangely shaped, drifting across the hull in a calm warm breeze. Altocumulus like a shoal of fish. Scud clouds racing across the wood in anxious herds. And around the stern a storm of biblical proportions, exaggerated and impossible. Nimbostratus, fractonimbus, rollers and anvils. And in tiny detail, chasing the storm - low on the transom - the ugly shape of the rag cloud. She sketched these in, rubbed them off with screwed-up newspaper, redrew and remeasured them. Then it was finished: a storm and a little bit of bright blue sky sitting on the back lawn.
On a grey late-summer morning she launched this beautiful patch of sky into the Middle Level Main Drain at the appropriately named Magdalen Bridge. A fisherman left his keep-net to see the launch, helping my mother put the little boat in and slapping the gaudy paintwork with amusement. Along the bank more fishermen stood up and cheered as our odd little spectacle passed. One man even dropped an eel when he saw the boat, and a postman riding along the bank wobbled as he tried to look back and wave. My mother loved it all.
At the damp brick bridge by Three Holes, my mother hailed Mrs Holbeach and Elsie when they were stil
l just two oddly sized dots in the distance. One, as large as a beet sack, the other, slim and tomboyish, with a brilliant smudge of red hair.
That day we went along Popham’s Eau Canal, where we moored the Mary Magdalene to an abandoned tractor engine rusting on the bank. A thin bleed of oil made a rainbow film across the water. Elsie watched me playing along the bank, fishing handfuls of heavy green weed and chasing the eels that tried to wriggle back to the drain.
From a discarded blue flip-flop I made a flimsy boat with a lollipop mast and a crisp-packet sail. I stuck a feather into the top of the mast and put pebbles on the back of the boat, placing one each for my mother, my father, a slightly larger one for Mrs Holbeach and two smaller ones for Elsie and me. They all guessed which one was Elsie; her pebble was brick red.
When I launched it the waterlogged craft drifted half-submerged a couple of feet or so away from the bank. It didn’t want to move. I found a stick and gave it a solid shove and in doing so it tunnelled under water, and a smooth glassy wave swept my father clean off before I could grab him. I turned to my mother and Mrs Holbeach and saw a look of conspiracy pass between them, a recognition that justice had been done.
Two weeks later it was all very different. It was dawn and cold and Elsie and I were sitting calmly in the boat while my mother carried bags from the car. She put them round our feet and we could see inside them and we knew it wasn’t going to be a normal picnic. There were blankets, clothes, a book or two. A torch fell on to the planks of the boat. My tartan suitcase wrapped up in a plastic bin liner to keep it dry.
I unclipped the notepad and pencil from round my neck and began to write a question, and the letters I wrote seemed to be in Mrs Crowe’s handwriting and not my own. As I was looking at them I felt my mother’s hand closing my notebook as she said not now, love, let’s just get going.
Elsie began to cry ever so quietly and I think my mother did too, though she quickly made light of it and told us she was only crying outside because she was laughing on the inside.
Ahead of us, the sky’s reflection was almost perfect in the still water of the drain and I lay down on my back, hanging my head over the side to look up at the sky and clouds and watch the reed beds passing upside down.
We continued all day along the Great Ouse, Popham’s Eau, through Three Holes - passing near Elsie’s house in silence - and into the Twenty Foot Drain. We arrived at the heavy iron wall of a sluice gate, damp and weedy in the afternoon light, and had to haul the Mary Magdalene up the bank to launch it the other side, where the water was higher. At the top of the bank, just as the boat was tipping with the urge to slide down the other side, I looked far into the distance and saw a huge bank of storm clouds, roughly in the direction we’d come from. My mother saw me looking and perhaps guessed that I knew what it meant. Look, it’s raining at home, she said. Better off here. And with that, the boat lunged down the slope and splashed into the new channel.
The light was going and we were all sitting in the back of the boat. We were huddled together for warmth. My mother had spread a car blanket over us and we’d eaten sandwiches of tongue and cheese, then boiled eggs dipped in a little pillbox of cracked salt. The engine was overworked and smelled of hot wires and oil. Then it started to splutter and my mother shook it and the petrol gauge was right at the bottom. She shook it again and the engine died. The boat glided in the water without direction. I looked at my mother but couldn’t tell whether she felt defeated or calm or indifferent to the whole situation. Where we were and what was going on, it didn’t really matter to her. She wasn’t really moving or trying to start the engine and Elsie was staring down at her lap as if she’d been told off.
We drifted into one of the banks of reed beds and I sat there for a while snapping the dry stalks. No one did anything. We were there a long time. No one passed. Then my mother unclipped the hand-paddle and pushed us out into the channel. She paddled us a hundred feet or so, then turned into a tiny drainage channel, not much wider than the boat. She punted us up this channel till the boat got stuck between the banks and then we just sat there as the night grew round us.
‘Can we go back?’ Elsie said quietly.
‘Soon. We’ll go back.’
Elsie took that calmly, an adult sensibility beginning to emerge in her. A share of responsibility between them now, for me.
‘And tomorrow,’ my mother said, deliberately brightly, ‘we’ll go in the yard and scrub those dirty pigs clean with baking soda and then paint them whatever colours we want. We can put lipstick on them and dress them up as clowns and Pip can paint a Union Jack on the fat one.’
‘Right,’ Elsie said. And then she began to cry again, and she said through her sobs, ‘We’re not going home, are we?’
‘No.’
My mother kissed us both and I realized that there, in that tiny, ludicrously painted rowing boat in the middle of the night in Bedlam Fen, at the end of a pointless drainage channel which had run out into nothing, with no space to even turn round, I was at home, utterly at home, with my mother and Elsie. Nothing else mattered. The farm, my father, everything up to that point, seemed so far away. Here, in Bedlam Fen, with the icy wink of the stars above us in the blue-black night and my mother in nervous collapse, this was where we all belonged.
‘I wish you were my mum,’ Elsie said bravely in the dark.
I don’t think any of us slept that night. But even though it was uncomfortable none of us complained. I remember how my mother wrapped all the blankets round us and then bound us in a length of rope that Elsie and I could hold at either end to keep our three bodies together. How she tied plastic bags over our shoes to keep our feet warm.
At around three in the morning Elsie said she was hungry and my mother gave us some Scotch eggs and crisps, and a plastic mug of chocolate from a flask. Some time later, I found the torch near my feet and wrote in my book: Mum, the stars are turning round. She read the message in the glare of torchlight, then she said turn that off, best we save the battery. We all stared up at the sky and the stars had indeed changed. Over the course of the night Orion had turned on his side ready to sink into the Fens again. Pip, she said, I’ve got you a present. And she gave me a small seashell like the ones hermit crabs live in. It’s from Blakeney Point, she said. Listen to it and you’ll always be near the sea, the North Sea, wherever you are.
Just before dawn in Bedlam Fen the first draught of air from the storm clouds reached us in our ditch, followed by plump, uncertain drops of rain. Then it began to pour down in heavy sheets. We could do nothing but get drenched while the earth spat mud around us and the fen steamed and boiled. Elsie climbed out and I ran after her, both of us slipping in the mud and she started laughing and running along the bank, our clothes skin tight and heavy with the water. I remember her hair and how flat it was and the slope of her thin shoulders and how big and wide her mouth looked.
‘Auntie May!’ she shouted, ‘Auntie May, you’re soaked!’
‘Like a fish!’ my mother said.
She sat in the boat, still and grey in the rain. She’d heard the engine of the launch that had just decelerated past the mouth of our drainage ditch. Elsie looked up and fell silent as she saw the men in dark green oilskins picking their way over the fen to where she was standing.
My father arrived first, swiftly ushering the others to grab the painter and drag the boat from the ditch. He took his own hat off and put it on my head and it felt warm and secure and ridiculous. One of the other men gave Elsie his coat and she obediently put it round her shoulders, her hair plastered against her head and the man’s trench coat splayed on the mud around her as if someone had partially deflated her. My mother seemed on the edge of all this, but one of the men had given her some sort of large fishing umbrella and so she sat under that, motionless, emotionless, while the Mary Magdalene was hauled out backwards.
The boat my father led us to was a proper motorboat with bright windows and the glass all steamed up, like someone was having a bath inside. We w
alked over the slippery black mud of the fen towards these windows, the only light we could see in the entire misty landscape. Inside, a kettle boiled away in a small galley, and a radio played quietly in the corner. An alien world. Elsie and I were given towels and mugs of hot black tea as the men started the engine and the banks of the drainage channel once more began to slip by. Through the windows the fen looked suddenly dark and forbidding. On the roof of the cabin and down the front windows and as far as we could see the river water was pitted with the lead shot of rain.
The Mary Magdalene was dragged behind the boat on a thirty-foot length of towrope, pulling so fast the water curved against its prow in a beautiful glassy wave. And there was my mother, still silent, still gripping the man’s umbrella in her tiny patch of brightly coloured summer sky in a world gone completely bleak, the simple wedding band on her finger like the last ray of sunlight.